The presentation will discuss the implementation of a small digitization grant project. We'll go through the entire process from start to finish to give participants a sense of the documentation, responsibilities, and hitches that occur in even well-planned projects

This article discusses a recent oral history project conducted by the University Archives, Iowa State University Library, which documents students' campus experience and concentrates on the university's annual celebration, VEISHEA. By focusing on current students, the University Archives has been able to actively document student life and become better aware of the numerous student activities on campus. The project has enabled the archives to build bridges to previously undocumented student groups. The contact through these interviews has led to the donation of records from these groups, and has made these students more conscious of their role in the university's history and their responsibility to document it.

Archival administrators are beginning the search for administrative tools that rationalize difficult preservation priority decision-making processes. Some are suggesting that the new appraisal literature be evaluated for its application to preservation selection. This article reviews the literature covering archival appraisal's role in the process of selection for preservation in archives, and addresses recent efforts to create archival preservation assessment and selection tools. It also provides overviews of some modern appraisal models which are intended for collections and preservation archivists who are working with selection-for-preservation issues. The author suggests that archivists need to concern themselves less with implementing preservation selection tools. They must concentrate first on understanding the values that make archival records significant, and then rationalize their preservation selection decision-making processes. Then, and only then, should the decisions' hierarchy and flow be incorporated into a preservation assessment and selection tool that is adaptable to individual archival institutions, yet consistent enough to yield comparable data.

The author explores the need for the Master of Archival Studies (M.A.S.) degree in the United States and its expression through the Society of American Archivists' Guidelines for the Development of a Curriculum for a Master of Archival Studies. He contends that the substantial and distinct body of archival knowledge, coupled with the emergence of new information technologies that have changed the way archives are created, maintained, and used, make an autonomous two-year degree curriculum necessary. The article examines SAA's history in educational guidelines development, the Canadian experience with educational guidelines and twelve years of M.A.S. degree programs, the growth of U.S. graduate archival education during the 1980s, and major features of the 1993 draft M.A.S. guidelines

On October 26, 2001, only six weeks after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, President George W. Bush signed into law the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001 (USA PATRIOT Act). The quick response was prompted by a perceived need to provide government officials with the tools they believed were necessary to fight terrorism. With little debate, the Senate and the House of Representatives resoundingly voted in favor of the Act.1 The reauthorization of the USA PATRIOT Act would not come as quickly. Several sections of the Act were set to expire on December 31, 2005; however, the deadline was moved to February 3, 2006, and again to March 10, 2006, to allow Congress time to reach agreement. The Act was reauthorized on March 9, 2006, but not without changes to the original Act.

The number of repositories dedicated to collecting women's papers has grown substantially in the past quarter century, with no fewer than 15 established after 1990. This article analyzes that trend, arguing that activists—as well as scholars and archivists—have been at the forefront in establishing these new archives. As the fields of women's history, women's studies, and gender studies have matured, and as women's historians have broadened their vision to include diverse groups, geographic regions, and topics, significant gaps in the documentary record have become evident. Scholars, archivists, and activists have responded to that need with new collecting initiatives and new archives. The authors contend that woman-centered repositories will continue to play an important role in the archival landscape in the coming decades.

A profusion of new preservation literature has rapidly developed from current research, technological experimentation and pilot projects, task forces, and conferences. The drive to disseminate new approaches in preservation management to practicing collections managers has also contributed to this new base of literature. This essay introduces recent advances in preservation administration and their implications for archival practice, through an examination of the preservation-related publications released in the last few years. It also confirms a growing interest among archivists in preservation ideas from other information management fields, particularly in the areas of selection for preservation, standard preservation assessment methods, preservation of electronic media, the use of digital technology in preservation reformatting, and specialized media preservation.

Providing proper housing and storage of archival materials is a primary goal undertaken in all archives. Standard containers for manuscripts, documents, photographs, three-dimensional objects, and other archival materials are readily available. However, for nonstandard, unusual, or complex objects that require additional support, developing housing or specialized storage can be problematic. Thinking creatively about housing and storage of archival materials increases the wealth of housing options available to archives even when a conservator is not available. Archivists can incorporate premade and traditional archival supplies in innovative ways to create structures that store and protect, while at the same time, limit handling during use and exhibition. Three basic methods (sink mats, boxes with fillers, and archival sleeves and wrappers) can assist in this process and are illustrated with examples from the Iowa State University Library Special Collections.

This article reports and interprets the data collected from the author's 1995 survey of 142 archives and manuscripts repositories at Association of Research Libraries institutions and their automated access practices. The goals of the study are, first, analyzing the data gathered to understand the development of archives' automated access programs and, second, understanding the extent to which libraries'cataloging and automated systems units interact with their institutions' archival repositories in their common mission of creating and maintaining intellectual access to research materials. These interactions are analyzed in areas such as automated applications development and maintenance, use of specific automated access tools, overall responsibility for program planning, and the provision of training.